The Best Business Book of 2023 (According to Every Other Best-of-2023 List)

The year-end lists have landed.

In choosing favorites, judges are looking for great books published in 2023, and they are also looking for titles that describe the Year 2023.

If you think about the book publishing process though, the first thought in the creation of these books was three, four, five, or even ten years ago. Authors and their publishers saw a seed of an idea for a book that should exist in the world. The author(s) wrote through the next years, influenced on some level by the evolving cultural landscape. And these books are then published and their success requires some amount of luck that they will arrive to match the moment. That’s always been part of the unpredictable nature of the industry.

That is also what makes these lists fascinating. We get to see what different arbiters value in relation to the year passed.

My attempt every year with this best of best-of list is to see if there is something a little broader that we can observe in making sense of 2023.

The Process

This year, I used six lists that focus on business titles and associated non-fiction books to serve at the core data set.

All of these lists were published in the last few weeks and capture the full spectrum of books that were released in 2023. I use the full long list of selections to give a broad cross-section of books that garnered attention. I also used the long lists, because many of them don’t designate higher statuses, like an overall winner or other category winners.

The Results

This year:

170 titles that appeared uniquely across the six lists (very similar to last year).
Twenty books that appeared on two lists.
Three books were selected by three lists.

The key difference this year is a return to multiple titles for the top honor. In 2021 and 2022, there was only one title that appeared across four or more lists. Last year, it was Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and the year before that, The Conversation by John Livingston. For 2023, there are four books that appeared on four different lists.

The Books of The Year

1. The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and The 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar

In 2023, AI hit the mainstream. ChatGPT became the Facebook of 2020’s, with the mainstream using the tool. Suleyman has a decade headstart on all of us, having co-founded UK-based DeepMind. DeepMind and its variants have beat the top humans in Go and Chess and developed superior algorithms for video compression and speech-to-text. This makes Suleyman a credible source for writing a cautionary tale on possibilities for artificial intelligence and synthetic biology. He opens the book with histories of technology and their varied unintended consequences. Think of fossil fuels, refrigerant gasses, and nuclear fission. Suleyman says we need that same perspective with this next wave of technology. AI models are integrating trillions of pieces of data and the resources to run them are quickly shrinking. Consider halicin, the first machine learning derived antibiotic that has high potential for treating tuberculosis. Then consider that in six hours, the similar algorithms identified 40,000 molecules with similar toxicity to today’s most deadly chemical weapons. The Coming Wave is a great eye opener to see the speed and the magnitude that technology will continue to evolve.

2. The Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things by Adam Grant

It is interesting to put Suleyman’s work next to Grant’s new book. Grant opens The Hidden Potential in talking about how humans learn and how easily we get in our own way. Perfectionism dampens experimentation. Egoism causes us to resist what the world is trying to teach us. Overall, the book is Grant’s examination of motivation and what high-achievers do better. He avoids rehashing his Wharton colleague Angela Duckworth’s work on grit and Theresa Amabile’ research on progress. Instead, he works at the edges and works to illuminate other components of character that lead to success.

3. How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine The Fate Of Every Project, From Home Renovations To Space Exploration And Everything In Between by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner

I love this book and I am so glad it made the list. I know it is the engineer in me and all the talk about the nature of success on mega, multi-billion dollar projects. They apply to small projects to. Two big learnings for me: 1. Planning is everything. Before Pixar starts, they storyboard everything. Each board is two seconds, so 2700 boards for 90 minutes. They narrate those boards and turn it into animatics. And they keep storyboarding until the story is right, five and six times, all before it moves into production. 2. Make big things out of small things. Modularity delivers faster, cheaper, better. Repetition is the mother of learning. GigaFactory Nevada is twenty-one smaller factories in one big building. Solar, power transmission, wind, roads – all modular. Always remember that planning is cheap and safe, delivering is expensive and dangerous

4. Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmondson

Amy Edmondson won The FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year for Right Kind of Wrong and I think it is well-deserved. Edmondson starts with the important work of distinguishing those kinds of wrong. Though they might sound similar, failures, errors and violations are not the same thing. And our emotions make failing hard because we fear failure, we instinctively move away from the difficult, and we get confused about what kind of failing is happening. Combat errors with training and error-proofing. Practice to learn and improve. The call to action for me was: have a bias for iteration, experiment fearlessly!